To Blog Or Not To Blog - To Blog!

Experimental Blog 1 of - well, you tell me how many it takes to get the hang of elegant publishing the blogging way...

2009-04-21

Evening sky

Yesterday, we were shown this breathtaking sunset from the living room windows (those are upstairs...) -

I had some difficulty in framing it - ideally, I should have been floating in air some 5-10 meters to the left of the house. And reaching out the window as far as I could reach, I did find it difficult to focus where I wanted exactly to get the light right.

So I confess having tweaked the image a bit - cropped and added an adjustment layer in Photoshop. But I swear to Bob that the colours are bang on my recollection of them!

(oh - and while I was at it, I removed a very irritating TV arial... ;)

2009-04-03

Feeling at home

Today, I went two hundred kilometers and back.To and from a place which is 10.365 kilometers or 6441 miles away from home.

This evening, I realised what it was I felt.I felt at home.

At home?

??

I've always thought of home as a place. Somewhere you can mark with an 'X' on the map. Somewhere special. Real. With a dimension of geographical presence.

I've also heard the version that 'Home is where I lay my head'. Or my hat, for that matter.

Home is both more and less than those things. Less than a specific place in space. More than a feeling.

Home is a state of mind.And that particular state of mind can be reached in probably a handful of ways.

My very near ones, my loved ones, can induce it in a wink of an eye. Yes, here I belong, with you, us. That is home.

Books can do it. I'm so much always home in a book that it is such a disappointment when I dive into one and find out that, no, in this one, I'm not. But generally, I enter the book's universe and I'm at home. Magic of books, that is.

Nature does it to me. A steep slope of a mountain, the lush greenness of a spring forest, the moon or a clear star shining to me from a dark night's sky, a sudden buffeting of strong winds on a steep sidewalk in Brazil. I'm at home in nature.

Friends, friends really can do it, too. And music can do it. Like both did today. On a long road where I had no business feeling at home.

Yet I did. Very much so.

And oh, how I feel lucky for it.

- - - - - - - - -

Here is the start of this - rapidly jotted down at the corner terrace table at the Catedral do Chopp in Campinas, Brazil:

...at some point, the waiter's pen stopped working. And given that he didn't speak English and I surely don't speak Portuguese and that I had literally stolen it out of his breast pocket, I chose not to try to get another pen...